mag wrote on Jul 16, 2015, 00:11:Okay, fine, let's try for some books. Type in a book title... only used copies available. Try another book title? Only used copies available! Obviously they actually do (must!) still have a large selection of books that they sell, but there are some enormous holes in their stock that wouldn't have existed ten years ago.

Trust me on this, I work for a book publisher: If amazon doesn't have it, no one has it. I'd have to say you were either looking for very obscure, or old out of print titles.

If it weren't for their recent and very high-profile attempts to strong-arm Hachette by refusing to sell their books, I'd be inclined to agree with you. As is, pretty easy to believe that they're either having another tiff with another publisher or trying to push more people toward Kindle versions. I unfortunately can't recall the titles I was looking for right now, but they were moderately successful/popular sci-fi/fantasy books published within the past ten years or so. It's possible they were out of print, but it was really hard to believe. One had been published only a couple years prior.

Edit: Okay, so this inspired me to try to remember and do a little more investigating. I did remember one of the things I was trying to find was the Tales of the Flat Earth series by Tanith Lee, when she died back in May. This is one of her more famous series, and she was a pretty prominent author, so it seemed pretty crazy that it would be out of print. And it had actually been published by a new publisher in 2010.

But apparently that publisher went kaput in 2013 or 2014, DAW was supposed to pick up some of the titles, and it sounds like they never picked those up. So that's why that one's missing.

That was just one of a handful of instances I had over a few months, so maybe I just had a string of bad luck for a while. It was right on top of a string of bad Amazon shipping experiences, so I was already pretty willing to be annoyed at 'em.

Task wrote on Jul 15, 2015, 22:36:*Shrugs* A lot of the misc stuff is probably useful to folks that shop online all the time for anything. Its not just a online hub for buying movies and games; its practically an online department store now (gas grills, leaf blowers, shoes, clothes, and pink bras ahoy!).

My recent experience has been that Amazon doesn't actually sell anything anymore. Everything is sold by someone else, and Amazon just handles fulfillment. Get Amazon credit that says it must be used on items sold by Amazon? Gooooood luck. I had like $20 to get rid of by a deadline, so I'm like... okay. Let's try some video games. Nope. Computer hardware? Nope. Board games? Nope.

Okay, fine, let's try for some books. Type in a book title... only used copies available. Try another book title? Only used copies available! Obviously they actually do (must!) still have a large selection of books that they sell, but there are some enormous holes in their stock that wouldn't have existed ten years ago.

Bill Borre wrote on Jul 14, 2015, 20:06:God is telling us we should love Pluto and restore its planetary status.

Actually, they are. NASA has hinted that the newest measurements from the fly-by will push Pluto over the mass limit, and its spherical geometry may do so as well.

Really, the issue is that 240-odd people (at a conference that had 10,000 attending) decided, after the majority of the other folks had left the conference, to de-list Pluto for whatever reason. There was never a large sentiment in the astronomical community to de-list Pluto in the first place. And the fact that the new "rules" for planets are just as fraught with issues as the old ones (there's some argument that, if the Earth was situated in the asteroid belt or even in the Kupier Belt, it wouldn't be able to "clear its orbit" [one of the new requirements for planetary status] either...), has left many astronomers ignoring the de-listing. In many ways, NASA, et al., are just owning up to the fact that the scientific community never was on board with the de-listing in the first place...

The size of Pluto has nothing to do with its classification as a planet or lack thereof. The issue was that we were finding lots of other Pluto-like objects (Eris, Sedna) of comparable or greater mass, and the Kuiper Belt was turning out to be way more populated than we thought.

So if they allowed Pluto to be a planet, this was opening up the door to, a hundred years from now, having 1000 objects that have every bit as much a right to be classified as plants. So, wanting a consistent definition that would rule out most trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt objects, they added the rule: has "cleared the neighbourhood" around its orbit."

Revisions of Pluto's size don't really affect that, unless it's now big enough that the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system is actually within Pluto. Then you might have a case.

Verno wrote on Jul 13, 2015, 14:05:You've declared war on a video game product, its time to step back and re-evaluate things man. If Star Citizen sucks no one is going to sugar coat it no matter what the moderators do on some random forum. There is no need to waste time or emotion on it but whatever floats your boat I guess.

Kxmode invested his belief, and entrusted a thousand dollars to CR and crew, trusting them to build the game they pitched. A hundred goalpost changes later, with nothing to show for it really, can you really blame him for being pissed?

Well, yeah. This is a video game that doesn't even exist yet. Your reaction to a Kickstarter not going the way you hoped should be no worse than "Well, damn, that sucks." If it's worse than that, you spent more than you could afford.

I use my PS3 as the media device hooked up to the TV, but anything would really do. Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and PlayOn running on a PC to stream Hulu (non-Plus) (and other) content to the PS3, I'm pretty set.

I use my PS3 as the media device hooked up to the TV, but anything would really do. Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and PlayOn running on a PC to stream Hulu (non-Plus) (and other) content to the PS3, I'm pretty set.

Mordecai Walfish wrote on Jul 5, 2015, 20:47:I didnt even know there were any physical prototypes. Awesome seeing this finally after a couple decades have passed from the first time a cd addon to the SNES piqued my interest. I would imagine nintendo would have continued to be a dominant player in the console industry if they would have gone through with this. The SNES had a primary limitation of being cartridge based when new mediums could store hundreds of times as much data. This would have coupled the impressive SNES hardware with a much better storage medium, which would have made for a very awesome console.

Contemporary CD-based systems were... really bad, though. The load times where absolutely abysmal on all of the competitors of the day. I doubt it would be remembered very fondly, if the SNES had been CD-based.

Rigs wrote on Jun 30, 2015, 15:27:And what do we all do? Sit here and bitch about it. Yet, come election day, we'll gladly check those marks for the same bastards that have been in office most of their life and probably will retire there...

I'm sorry, you can't complain (well, I mean you 'can', but still) if you blindly go in and vote the same mothersfuckers in each and every time and each and every time they do nothing. Who's stupider? The fool or the fool that keeps voting them into office?

I'm 37 and I haven't voted once in my life. Not once. Only because no one has come around that had me thinking they would actually make a damn bit of difference. And I don't foresee anyone in the near half century either! Dark, sad days ahead of us and the only one to blame is ourselves!

=-Rigs-=

By not voting, you are implicitly voting them in yourself. Thanks, buddy!

PHJF wrote on Jun 16, 2015, 12:11:Skies of Arcadia made it to GCN (a 10x better console). I had a friend during high school whose basement featured a Dreamcast. Besides the odd round of Power Stone, it ended up being mostly used for Virtua Tennis. The friend himself was a prominent supporter of Jet Grind, a game I've never enjoyed. I'll give you points for PSO, but other than that... there's a reason Dreamcast killed Sega.

Instead, the company is bringing back Radio Walmart after 9 years, meaning an actual DJ will keep things fresh, rather than playing the same handful of CD’s over and over as many stores did, driving countless associates (and customers, too, probably) batty. Even better, individual stores will have more control over their thermostats rather than having headquarters decide.

Foran also talked about a new push he called the “10-feet rule.” Associates must greet customers and make eye contact when they are within 10 feet as a way to lift sales.

Yeah, because that's not annoying at all. I *hate* the retail experience simple because of this mindset. Everytime I walk in, or even by a place, you hear 'Hi how are you? - like you really care - 'Is there anything I can help you with/If you need anything let me know.' Gee? Really? Thanks I never would have figured that out on my own, I thought you were part of the display. Just leave me alone, you'll know if I'm seeking you out because you'll hear, 'Excuse me...'

Most people actually desire human contact, there's a reason those questions are asked. You are an extreme outlier of society who wants to live in a cucumber flat or whatever, accept that its not aimed at you.

The only reason those questions are asked is that it's been demonstrated that it reduces shoplifting.

And yet, our very own Pentagon employs trolls too and so do other Western intelligence services - The JTRIG document. US Airforce uses software to create an Army of fake people. So all is fair in love and war? So yeah, everyone does it, not just Russia but the MSM blasts the headlines with Russia does it, not us! And yet if you google search "us army/pentagon paid trolls" ALL you get is Russia.

What's even more funny is that on occasion, I've been called a "russian troll" on other sites when I didn't "tow the mainstream line" so to speak. It reminds me of how it was long ago if you were anti-war in WW1/WW2, historically people were called unpatriotic and such tripe. During the Cold War, you were called a "Pinko Commie" or "Red" for joining the anti-war or civil rights movement. Its the same thing today - you are either with us, or you are the enemy sort of nonsense.

The more you demean a society and their people by projection, the easier it is when the time comes for bombs to fly and shoot to kill.

Alright, so Task is one of them. How many more of our resident trolls are actually Russians?

weird decision. that movie made boatloads of money. just not enough boatloads i guess. really lame cuz i love kosinski's work. he's one of the best new big budget directors around; i'd take him over JJ abrams 10/10 times.

Yeah, I'm not sure why they're not? Tron Legacy made $400M worldwide. That being said, big budget sci fi hasn't been panning out lately. Fury Road has just broken even, and didn't even win its opening weekend. Jupiter Ascending, Chappie, Edge of Tomorrow, John Carter, Elysium, and Dredd, to name a few have not made any money. The ones that have have either been superhero movies or Michael Bay movies.

Fury Road is at $240M world wide against its $150M budget. It's done fine.

InBlack wrote on May 21, 2015, 09:34:The Witcher3 looks and runs GREAT. Even on older hardware.

Only thing that matters, time to move on.

It does not! Intel Xeon E5-1650 3.20GHz(essentially 12 threads), 48 gigs of ram and GTX 670 here and I can barely run the game in 1080p in medium. I sure as hell ain't getting 60 fps either. That game looks good, but not as good as it should for my hardware. I think the game is badly optimised. Also, the pre-rendered cutscenes run like sh*t. Like, 10 fps.